Lord Bates: My Lords, with the leave of the House I will repeat the Answer to an Urgent Question given by my right honourable the Secretary of State for International Development in the other place earlier today.
“The combined global aid spend totals $150 billion dollars, leaving a funding gap of $2.5 trillion to deliver the global goals. We are adrift on the global goals— 80 years off nutrition, 100 years off education, 200 years off poverty. We must ask ourselves: do we want to deliver the global goals? If we want to, we have to let others help, including the private sector.
We have had good returns from investing in developing countries. CDC’s average annual investment return is 7%. The City of London manages over £8 trillion in assets, but little is invested in the poorest countries. Even a small increase could have a huge impact on these economies. For example, if we could redirect just 1% of the total assets to investment opportunities in Africa, that would generate an additional investment of around $110 billion. By contrast, global aid flows to Africa in 2016 were worth just $50 billion. I believe the public would be interested in their savings and pension funds being used to deliver the global goals. Why can British people not go to banks and invest their savings in pensions and products that will invest in the global goals, or open up an app on their phone and select which global goals they would most like to invest in?
We have lots of tools to do this. As we outlined today, the World Benchmarking Alliance, which I unveiled at the UN General Assembly will rank countries on their contributions to the global goals, so people can decide which companies they want to buy from, invest in or work for. We have the expertise to do this: the City of London in the financial services sector, in DFID and elsewhere in development and impact investment. Today I have announced that I want to  start a national conversation with financial institutions, but also with savers, pensioners and the wider public. We will announce the findings of that conversation  at the UK Africa investment conference next year.  We will work with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development to make sure that the aid rules incentivise private sector investment where it is needed. This is the only way we will collectively deliver the financing necessary to meet the global goals. In future years, as the amount of funding coming back into our own development financial instruments increases, we should be open to using these profits to count towards 0.7%. I am exploring the scope to reinvest those funds with DAC—the Development Assistance Committee—to maximise the value of our investments.”